Monitoring and Remote Control of Dispersed Facilities.
Wonderware SCADA Platform for monitoring and remote control of dispersed facilities.
We are living in the SMART era: where television is no longer the idiot box but a smart TV, where the mobile phone is no longer just a telephone but a smartphone. And in all of this, we also include concepts such as : Smart City, Smart Utility, and even Smart Infrastructure.
We can consider a SMART system as one that makes decisions in real time, in an agile and automated way. Therefore, information is required, a lot of information, in real time or near real time.
Therefore, the first milestone in the roadmap for the “smarterization” of cities, infrastructures (airports, tunnels, trains, …) and Utilities (water, gas and electricity), is none other than the Monitoring and Remote Control of dispersed facilities.
“Monitoring and remote control of facilities for intelligent management of dispersed facilities”
Due to their nature, the locations of these types of facilities are characterized by being:
- Geographically dispersed
- Unattended
- Difficult to access
- Slow and intermittent communications.
- No electrical grid available always
- Extreme environmental conditions
This scenario entails challenges at all levels, from field devices (RTUs) to the control center platform.
Below, we list the main challenges at the control center level and how the Wonderware SCADA platform resolves them:
- Scalability: Wonderware System Platform is highly scalable, allowing real-time management of up to 2 million input/output signals.
- Distributed architecture: Wonderware’s architecture natively integrates multi-site environments into a single SCADA platform
- Redundancy: Wonderware enables redundancy and load balancing with object servers (AOs).
- Interoperability: The OI Servers (Operations Integration), which manage data capture, include industrial drivers that allow communication downstream with the main manufacturers of field devices.
- Big Data: Historian allows storing the large amount of data captured. In addition, Historian can be deployed taking into account different historization needs, architectures and/or deployment models.
In our “smarterization” roadmap for infrastructures, cities and utilities, we cannot miss:
- GIS Solution: The information must be georeferenced and it is required to provide agile navigation through the visualization environments through maps, plans, etc. For this, Wonderware Spain has created the infrastructure management platform (GiSize!)
Figure 1. Application of GISize! in an airport environment.
- Maintenance Management: The continuous monitoring of our facilities is of great help for the optimization of maintenance. At a reactive level, we can immediately notify (Micromedia Alert) the maintenance brigades of any incident. We can also anticipate failures with predictive maintenance tools (Avantis Prism).
- Data Analysis: The captured data must be contextualized and converted into information, for this we rely on a powerful Business Intelligence tool (Wonderware Intelligence)
Our success story “Barcelona: The city that flows. Intelligent management of the irrigation system for parks and gardens” (BCASA/Ajuntament de Barcelona) is a good example of how the Wonderware Platform solution allows managing, monitoring and remotely controlling dispersed facilities in an urban environment.
If you want to know more about this project and the Wonderware technological solution, we invite you to attend the next March 13, 2018 in Barcelona at the Meet&Talk Day “Solutions for acquisition, transmission and information management for infrastructure environments” organized by Logitek and Wonderware Spain. This success story will be the common thread throughout the day to delve into technologies and solutions that allow the capture of information and its subsequent visualization on the platform. In addition, you can learn how our GISize! solution facilitates navigation and interaction on georeferenced information in Wonderware environments.
